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THE POLK COUNTY PULSE
April 12, 2017
GOD IS IN CONTROL? (or “Humanity Gone Crazy”) References: Romans 1:18-25 Matthew 13:24-30 Philippians 2:9-11
It is still true. God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. God is omnipresent. God is still God and He is more God than we can ever imagine. This is all still true, but… something is terribly wrong with it all! How many times have I heard the statement, “God is in control?” And, every time I hear it, or read it, something just ties up in knots inside of me. The statement does not match with what we observe in this word, nor does it match up with the theology that it assumes. There are some things about the statement that need to be evaluated. First, if God is truly at all times and in all ways in control, then He has made a terrible mess of things! That means that He could have stopped Hitler before the whole world got into a war that killed, blew up, tore apart, millions of young men and destroyed millions of families. The casualties of all wars are horrible beyond expression. Question: did God do this? If He is in absolute control, then the answer must be “yes.” But the fact is, God did NOT do it! God’s sovereignty allowed Him to create life and people with the will and the freedom to make REAL CHOICES! And, the real choices that men have made over centuries have caused all sorts of horrible things. Humanity has gone crazy. When a teenaged girl is being brutally beaten, raped, and murdered, did God do that? When she cries out, “what kind of a God do you serve?” What do you say? For those who say that His “control” is absolute, the answer must be “yes.” But He did not do it! No! God is not the Author of evil! And our undersanding of Him must never make Him to be so. In creation, God created a people “in His image” and “in His likeness.” If this means anything at all, it must mean that mankind was created with the ability, and responsibility, to make real choices, real decisions, even if those choices did not conform to God’s desire. Freedom to make real choices enables us to truly love each other and to love and serve God, or, it enables us to rebel against Him and every standard that He has established. And, there are consequences… always consequences! I think that some of those who make this statement do simply because they can’t understand why things happen as they do, and it is just easy to say, “Well, God has a reason for this.” NO! There are things that happen that fall far outside of what God has a “reason” for. Make no mistake about this. God is in control in the ultimate sense, and He will step in and close it all down in His own time. But, in the interim, because of something called the “sin nature,” we will continue to “mess it up.” If you have studied the Word of God, you will have read that Jesus called Satan the “prince of this world.” And, you will remember the passage in 1 John that says, “the whole world lies in the evil one.” You will remember, do you not? And in this interim, believe it or not, God is doing what He set out to do; He is creating a people for Himself, and that “people” will be made up of those who use their ability to make real choices to choose to love and worship Him. This life is not a stage play, where all of the lines are written for us, and the outcome is pre-determined with no real choices to be made. This life is real. Choices that we make are real. Consequences are real. Final accountability is fixed in place. God will NOT make our choices for us! He will guide us by His Spirit IF WE ARE YIELDED TO HIM! Even then, disobedience is a real and ever-present possibility. It is human disobedience that has caused the mess that we have made, not the One Who gave His Son to fix it! THIS PAGE PURCHASED BY GENE STACKS